Entries associated with the tag "Judd Apatow":

Decided to punish myself last weekend with Judd Apatow's latest assembly-line homage to all his good-guy high school buddies, Enduring Sarah Marshall . . . whoops, fucked up the title (excuse my French, apparently it's contagious), but y'all know what I'm driving at. Just the familiar beta-male blend of regressive gender fantasies: self-pitying schlub hero (calling Mrs. Portnoy!) wins over va-voom! mannequin brunet after being dumped by equally va-voom! mannequin blond (who comes to regret the dumping, natch) and providing a couple of R-rated peeks at his bashful schlong (not to rub it in, but even the latex extender in Catherine Breillat's Sex Is Comedy is more transgressive—not to mention a whole lot funnier). And Jonah Hill's in it too . . . like, yyyaaaaaaahhhhh!

Which is why I'm still feeling grateful for Sunday's double-feature companion, Wong Kar-wai's My Blueberry Nights, as antidote to the spoiled-Hawaiian-pineapple aftertaste of Judd. Only Blueberry's been getting ho-hum reviews and Sarah mostly good ones—so why is that? Since even with its multiple glaring flaws (and the distributor's own mutilations/excisions/abridgments), Blueberry's the only one of the two I can imagine myself voluntarily—even eagerly—watching again. What could be more seductive—from the unreadable cursive lettering on the windows (which immediately put me in mind of Orson . . . I mean, Norman Foster's Journey Into Fear, all the environmental wordplay that nobody knows how to decipher) to the convertible enchantments of Natalie Portman at the wind-whipped end of her tether, as suggestively wrung out as the hardscrabble Nevada landscape that engulfs her.

Which of course I'm a born sucker for, these nonnative excursions into the Great American Vacancy—Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, Wenders's Paris, Texas and Don't Come Knocking ... even Bruno Dumont's critically thrashed and pummeled Twentynine Palms (another flawed fave of mine), with its lines of windmill generators and endlessly rolling boxcars and surreal explosions of highway detritus—auto dealerships and Tastee Freezes among the strip-mall palms, etc—set down in the Death Valley middle of nowhere. So nondescript and desperate that only a sodden romantic could love the place. Which is probably all Jean Baudrillard's fault.

Postscript: Don't everybody applaud, but this is probably the last post I'll be doing for a while. I'm having arthroscopic surgery 4/29 (right rotator cuff—oww, oww!) and won't be able to assault my computer for at least a couple of weeks. Whether any of this will affect (or, heaven forefend, improve) my writing or thinking about films remains to be seen. But at least I'll be able to throw my infamous hanging screwball again. In any case, ciao for now . . .

In a March 24 LA Times article (linked through GreenCine Daily), Patrick Goldstein speculates on one of the great questions of our time: What ever happened to John Hughes?

"Hollywood is full of older masters who've been mentors to younger acolytes," Goldstein (over)generously concedes. "But Hughes, 58, is the only one who's disappeared without a trace; he quit directing in 1991, moved back to Chicago in 1995 and has basically stayed out of sight ever since."

Something I've wondered off and on about myself—assuming Hughes hasn't simply mutated into Judd Apatow Incorporated while none of us was looking. But Apatow himself apparently feels the loss, which presumably explains why he'd exhume an old Hughes story idea as plotline for Drillbit Taylor (starring Owen Wilson, pretty in pink as always), the Judd factory's current teen-market outing.

"John Hughes wrote some of the great outsider characters of all time," Apatow insists. "It's pretty ridiculous to hear people talk about the movies we've been doing, with outrageous humor and sweetness all combined, as if they were an original idea. I mean, it was all there first in John Hughes's films. Whether it's Freaks and Geeks or Superbad, the whole idea of having outsiders as the lead characters, that all started with Hughes."

Taking the notion another step toward absurdity, Dogma's Kevin Smith hyperbolically argues that Goldstein's hermit of the North Shore is actually "our generation's J.D. Salinger."

"He touched a generation and then the dude checked out," Smith mourns his departed hero. "If it weren't for him, I wouldn't be doing what I do. Basically my stuff is just John Hughes films with four-letter words." 

Which is probably why Dogma schmoes Jay and Silent Bob considered a slackers' tour of Shermer, Illinois, mythical burb cum high school of Breakfast Club/Ferris Bueller fame—also, not coincidentally, pseudonym of choice for Hughes's hometown, Shermerville being what suburban Northbrook originally was called. It's rumored Hughes still hides out there—though maybe it's churlish of me to bring it up, since he's taken so many pains to cover his professional tracks. Better no mentors at all than this kind of Hollywood schmoozing and dealing—a realization too late, for Hughes anyway, if not for the aspiring auteurs in his commercial wake.

But at least we'll always have Planes, Trains & Automobiles—so what kind of wonderful is that?

On Thursday night, Chicago's own John C. Reilly worked a packed house at the Cubby Bear to promote his upcoming comedy Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, about a hard-livin', hard-lovin' fictional singer-musician (a composite of Johnny Cash and others). Swaggering and swivelling his hips in character, Reilly and his tight back-up band performed about a dozen original songs from the movie, some of which he cowrote. The music and lyrics—both ribald and nuanced, clever and dumb-funny—drive the movie, which Jake Kasdan directed and cowrote with Judd Apatow. From the robust title tune (by Marshall Crenshaw, Reilly, Apatow, and Kasdan) to the very un-P.C. ode to short people, "Let Me Hold You (Little Man)" (by Dan Bern, Mike Viola and Manish Raval), to Bern's hilarious Bob Dylan parody "Royal Jelly" and Viola's soaring, Roy Orbison-esque ballad "A Life Without You (Is No Life At All)," Reilly demonstrated remarkable vocal range and stage presence. (Check out a video clip from the show here.)

Both the live show and the film set me thinking about how I love movie musicals and wish there were more. Not that there's much to complain about this past year: you couldn't name two movies as disparate as Adam Shankman's Hairspray and John Carney's Once , but both charmed critics and audiences alike, as did Kevin Lima's Enchanted. Also notable was Christophe Honore's Les Chansons d'Amour (Love Songs), a kind of  postmodern homage to Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg that played both the Toronto and Chicago film festivals. I have yet to catch up with Julie Taymor's Across the Universe, but I have seen Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, which opens December 21. Burton, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen, Alan Rickman, and Timothy Spall put a lot of sizzle into Sondheim.

So what will it take to get more musicals on the big screen? Well, it is show business, so if box office is good, with luck more will get made. Memorable songs, actors who can sing, and inventive staging go a long way—not to mention the kind of big marketing pushes given to Enchanted, Sweeney Todd, and Walk Hard. But dangling a little gold couldn't hurt, either. Maybe the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences should take a cue from the Golden Globes, which makes a distinction between dramas and musicals and comedies. If animated features have their own Oscar category, why can't musicals? 

When I first took up birding about 15 years ago, what surprised me most was how, well, interesting so many of the common birds suddenly became, the ones I'd always taken for granted—robins, house sparrows, even, every once in a while, pigeons (or "rock doves," as one of the state's top birders insisted they be called ... no snickering over "flying rats" for this guy). Rather than contempt, what familiarity evidently bred was a kind of general affection that indiscriminately rubbed off on everything feathered (as well as nonfeathered—but let's stick to avian life for now). Which makes me wonder why it's apparently so different with films, where typically the more you see and think you know, the less generous your critical responses are.

Not that I'm immune to the bilious critiques, the incessant rating and comparing that come so close to the heart of what we do. But: does it really have to be like that ... or at least so much of the time? This film isn't as "good" as that one, this performance only a shadow of what Russell or Nicole did in [fill in the blanks]—always on the ladder of relativity, inching our way up or down, as if the only available option for talking about "new" movie experience, its zero-degree phenomenology, involved ad hoc comparison with preexisting models. Which to a certain extent it does—we don't reinvent language ex nihilo, we're only as good as the concepts crammed into our heads. But: "To the things themselves!" Shouldn't that be the beau ideal? Experiencing film sui generis, inside-out and through the accessible surface, rather than as category instances with value indicators determined in advance. Only more and more that possibility seems to be closed off ...

As a matter of ideology, I used to think that even the "humblest" film, whatever that implies, had something unique to offer that was ultimately worth digging out. Probably I still do, only now the effort of finding those nuggets sometimes seems too daunting. What brought on the shift, from my (arguably) being open to everything to seeking out only 150-odd new films a year, was one excruciating make-or-break encounter—with Savage Steve Holland's How I Got Into College (1989), a coming-of-age comedy of the "screaming teen ferret" persuasion. What compromised swill! Obviously I broke, couldn't handle it anymore. Like catastrophe theory in action, or Malcolm McDowell's behavioral-aversion descent in A Clockwork Orange—for which I'm still having poor Judd Apatow pay the exacting psychic price.

So now there's no going back, and I take "discriminating" shortcuts like everyone else—history, context, "the ladder"—which I can't blame anyone for doing. But the all-inclusive way of the birder never seemed more inviting.

Film comedies have always been a problem for me, since for the most part I don't find 'em "funny." (Funny: what's that? When you laugh, I guess, though Rob Zombie movies—or Milla Jovovich in Resident Evil: Extinction ... can't hardly wait for that one!—probably don't count.) And with the recent canonization of everything Judd Apatow touches, things are looking bleaker all the time, at least from my side of the aisle. Poker-faced through The 40-Year-Old Virgin, poker-faced through Knocked Up, poker-faced through Superbad (I mean, what's with the decibel count: if the characters don't immediately turn into screaming, gesticulating ferrets, does it mean the "comedy" has somehow failed?). As desolating as it undoubtedly is, Aki Kaurismaki's Lights in the Dusk seems more chortlesome (now there's a word!) than anything Apatow et al have been able to cook up. Maybe it's the very numbness of it, like a whiff of nitrous oxide in the dentist's chair: cleaned out and bracing, daring you to find subliminal riffs in an open, airy void—what's not to like about that?

But still I'm not laughing, since that's not primarily what Kaurismaki's about ... so what does set me off comedywise? Probably a window to the soul in this—and maybe I should close it while the opportunity's still there—but so far this year it's been DeCillo's Delirious, Hartley's Fay Grim (two-thirds a white telephone movie elegantly skewed ... until the deplorable imploding finale), Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain!, Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz, Waitress if you care to count it, then ... nada, zilch, zero. What all these personal faves ultimately share is a reliance on mise-en-scene—on spatial relations and blocking, attitudes and movement, visual filigree—rather than literally "funny" lines. Obviously not into the yackety end of things, which wretched hearing partially accounts for—but only partially, since the same division holds with subtitled movies. And I do hate stand-up, the expectation to laugh's too overbearing and brutal—no Sarah Silvermans for this guy, please.

So what's the "best" comedy in the last five years? My own vote goes to—whoa, credibility alert!—Catherine Breillat's Sex Is Comedy (2002) ... which hardly seems anyone else's idea of a good time at all. Except for me it's almost a "been there, saw that" kind of deal—just a typewriter-wielding factotum at the derriere end of the trade (apologies for the imagery)—and, my god, she's got it all down cold: yes, they do actually debate which body parts to crop out of the frame and which photogs do or don't know how to shoot breasts and schlongs, etc. It's also extremely perceptive in what it emotionally deconstructs and clarifies ... maybe even too much so. You wonder how anyone with Breillat's kind of knowledge (or for that matter Anne Parillaud's, her alter ego in the film) can sustain a "romantic" relation at all. Or maybe she doesn't: insight as the ultimate incapacitator, a life beyond all fantasy ... but who's in a position to say?

Judd Apatow's decided to wade into the Knocked Up abortion debate with this video clip, which he announced via MySpace with this preface:

"Here is what many have requested—a scene from Knocked Up where the issue of abortion is debated in a brave, thoughtful, comprehensive way. We're just the messengers of two sides of this very important discussion."

So for those attached to lone-standing trees while the surrounding forest is being clear-cut, here's the answer to your prayers.

Abortion makes me uneasy. Don't like thinking about it, talking about it, listening to other people debate about it . . . I mean, even the embryos in chicken eggs make me squeamish: oops, cracked that one, there goes another potential avian life.

Not being an active party in the creation/extinction of anything recognizably humanoid, I can more or less indulge this visceral discomfort on an immediate, pragmatic level without being held seriously accountable. Judd Apatow's slacker romantic comedy Knocked Up would like to get away with that too—aaiiieee, the A word, let's not talk about it, OK?—but the behavioral understanding that underlies the film, about what people of a certain age/class/education/earning capacity do when confronted with purportedly "real-life" choices (though in fact they're all stereotypes—which actually reduces the amount of wiggle room available), doesn't make that option feasible. Since here's this putatively bright, upwardly mobile young media pro who's suddenly faced with the prospect of unplanned maternity (not to mention a coparenting doofus who doesn't remotely fit the social-status mold of self-actualizing mate), and we're expected to believe she never directly considers the possiblity of . . . well, you know. (Of course there's the brittle, neurotic sister—an avatar of self-entitlement, and we all know what that means in terms of whatever advice she has to give—who at least sends out exasperated signals; but it's all implicit, in quizzically raised eyebrows and grimaces of concern.)

And what about the audience? Are we feeling that 500-pound gorilla breathing down our necks? Waiting for some unspoken dramatic shoe to drop? Whew, what a relief it never does!—so now we can all stop holding our collective breath. But out in the hedonistic subdivision wilds, where notions of realizing your "me me me" potential, satisfying your innermost needs/urges/desires, etc, have been pounded in since birth, the likelihood of something like this happening seems vanishingly small. It's not a credible outcome, for these cardboard characters anyway. But the issue never literally comes up at all. 

Now if it were Carl Dreyer's "spiritualized," anhedonic Gertrud as aspiring mom . . . though Keri Russell in Waitress seems counterpoint enough. Not pro-life or pro anything necessarily, just tuned into something that goes beyond middle-class caveats and constraints. "Rationality" be damned, some decisions just run against the grain.

For them as care, a recent teapot tempest involving lawyers.

Though frankly I'd say the parties involved probably deserve each other—soul of a TV sitcom, hardly worth anyone's attention, much less all the critical kudos it's been getting . . . but that's my own dyspeptic view.

3 Men and a Cradle, anyone?